I wondered how I was going to introduce “Just So” to my blogsite, only to have the answer given me on that proverbial silver platter. Some two weeks ago, give or take a day or two, I contacted one of those, I’m-going-to-heaven-and-you’re-going-to-hell, blogsites. Without going into details, Mr. I’mGTHAYGTH assured me that an aunt of mine, as gentle, loving and forgiving Christiian who ever attended church regularly, was, even now suffering the torments of the damned in hell if she had not accepted the Lord Jesus Christ as her personal savior. Naturally, her equally, gentle, loving, forgiving Christian daughter and my cousin, is expected to love, adore, worship and pray to the God who may have sent her mother there . . . for all she knows. Her mother, she told me, never professed accepting Jesus as her personal savior.
Ah, hell. How dear to the heart is the subject of hell to those who pick and choose from among the scriptures they believe to be “God’s holy, inspired Bible”. If the verse contains the word hell, than their brains are set in concrete, free to disregard the many scriptures that declare Jesus spoke in Parables and in Parables Only. Hell-believers love to scare the living hell out of those who are not aware of a given fact: every doctrine the Christian church espouses, with the exception of the doctrine of hell, can be found in the letters Paul wrote to the churches. Paul stated, in forty-nine separate verses that he wrote the entire gospel, that he told the truth and that he did not lie. If Paul did not preach the doctrine of hell, he omitted it for a very good reason. He was unaware of such a place. Further “revelation” later on.
JUST SO
Thankful she was unaware
of grass in need of mowing,
of dandelions spawning and casting to their lot
a host of floating embryos,
or the bramble Romeo’s
courting feral roses on her plot,
I stood a moment viewing
berry vines cascading down
in wild profusion o’er the wall—
nearby the grave in which she lay—
and witnessed the intrusion:
the weedy, wild confusion:
I had no wish to stay.
An aunt of mine whom I held dear,
now lay at rest beneath the sod.
I thought about her there
waiting out eternity mid thorns and goldenrod.
Surrounded as I was by death,
I drew a long and saddened breath
recalling times and bygone days
when she gently chided me my lack of discipline
and my careless, wayward ways.
I remember well the old scenario:
My dear, it troubles me
to see disorder anywhere.
You know I like all things to be, just so.
It is a strange concept to me.
Rose
xo
Rose, nice to have your comment. I really can’t remember ever having believed that hell really existed, but I must have. I do remember vividly the very moment I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt, the entire concept came directly from such twisted minds of men as St. Augustine, one of the founders of the Christian religion. Someday I may write the story of how I came to know that neither Jesus nor Paul held that belief. Hell was the direct result of the rantings of men such as St. Augustine.
Yes I will be your friend, although I haven’t been around much lately.
Brian tells me that St. Augustine was a woman-hater. Good thing he never met us. 😉
Rose
xo
while i have no idea where your dear departed aunt is… i do know that she is not suffering in eternal damnation because she never saw fit to accept jesus as her personal savior… such ignorance makes me sick… literally!!!!!!
paisley, Long after both Jesus and Paul were dead and buried, paganism gradually invaded what, I suppose, can be called the earliest days of the Christian church, but the very earliest “church” and I can think of no other to term to make it understandable, were Jews who had known, followed, and believed Jesus to have been the chosen Messiah. They fully expected him to return to earth within their lifetime to free them from Roman rule and to set up the Kingdom of God. Jesus had told them he would do just that. Well, he didn’t return. Oh course, along comes Paul, and what do we have? Converts from the worship of Mithra and other dieties, and then what? An incorporation of pagan beliefs mixed in with Jewish beliefs and then what? Why hell, of course. Instead of Jewish scribes to write scripture, we now had men such as St. Augustine. Among my small but well-rounded personal library, there is an excellent book: 6000 years of the Bible by G. S. Wegener. A search for the truth reveals that any scripture in the New Testament mentioning a place called “hell”, is an interpolation and had nothing to do with what Jesus is supposed to have preached, or with what Paul wrote.
Mary –
Beautiful poem… I guess, it goes to show we can’t ever keep things “just so” in the end… can we? I admit, I’m not very good at doing the “just so” even now.. 😉
Nice intro too… you know that I, of course, relate.
You said, “Naturally, her equally, gentle, loving, forgiving Christian daughter and my cousin, is expected to love, adore, worship and pray to the God who may have sent her mother there . . . for all she knows. ”
I grew up being told my father was going to hell… I tried real hard to “save” him when I was younger… Eventually, I realized, it was he that was saving me all along…
~smj
While I do think there may be a Hell for those people who seem to be truly evil (The Jeffrey Dahmers of the world), I have never been able to latch onto the notion that just because you aren’t a Christian and attend church, that you will go to hell. It makes no sense to me. So I have ignored that. It makes me happier to think that the rules aren’t as strict as they say they are, because otherwise Heaven would probably be a pretty empty place.
Samantha, I have an idea of what you endured as a child because, and I wish I didn’t have this to remember, I have to think back on what my children endured after I left the Mennonite church in 1960, but their father remained a Mennonite “at heart” for the remainder of the decade. Of all addictions humans are prone to that can destroy happiness in a family, religion, when carried to extreme, is right up there with drinking too much, at least if was in my case.
Justin, while I understand how the concept of punishment after death for the all too many truly evil people in this world, came into existence, I take no pleasure in the thought of eternal punishment. Eternal death is good enough for me. This I realize in incongrous, but had Jesus been born in a region where winter prevailed most of the year, and had he used a parable to describe what happens when a person steals, trespasses or lies, he would have described a place called Hel, not Hell. In Hel, the wicked were to stand with their feet locked in eternal ice, or up their chest and so on. Hel was a place of eternal frost and ice, not fire. The Greeks had their mythological Hades. The Norsemen had their mythological Hel. When the Bible was finally translated into the English language, it doesn’t take much imagination to understand how the term, Hell, came to be substituted for Gehenna fire, Hades, Tartarus and Hel.